Q&A: Röyksopp

Interview by Nick Stevenson. Originally published in Mixmag in April 2009.

Röyksopp passed everyone by when debut album Melody AM first came out in 2001. It was only after the single ‘So Easy’ was used on T-Mobile’s first UK advert a year later that Svein and Torbjørn found their way into every discerning music fan’s collection. Since then, our love affair with the Norwegians has continued to flourish thanks to a wealth of strong singles, a darker second album, club-friendly remixes and their emotive live shows. Their new album, ‘Junior’, which includes guest vocalists Robyn and Lykke Li, apparently anticipates a darker, instrumental follow-up album, ‘Senior’, due later this year. Or so they tell us…

How would you describe the process of making the third album?
It was manual labour, similar to mining, but it’s been fun more than anything. When we did [second album] ‘The Understanding’ there was an atmosphere of melancholy – there was a lot of worn leather jackets, cigarette ash and cups of coffee. We had a Bruce Springsteen period. Now we are more happy.

That comes across in the single ‘Happy Up Here’. It’s optimistic.
It might be because we are so shallow and stupid and retarded – ignorance is bliss. We are the fool on the hill.

How do you make positive music?
We start with a collective image of how we want the track to sound and with ‘Happy Up Here’ we had the vision of the moment when you’re at a party and there’s a swimming pool, it’s late, all your best friends are there, you’re slightly intoxicated, you’re in your swimming trunks on the diving board and the second you hit the surface there are fireworks. That’s the kind of image we set out to make.

How did you hook up with Robyn for this album?
We met her a few weeks before she had her UK Number One. She’ll hate me for saying this but she’s the Swedish equivalent of Madonna, in terms of singing and how she changes her image and being a strong personality. We needed a strong voice with an element of, let’s be blunt, sexiness in it, and she has that in terms of how she sings.

Did you have a tidy up in the studio before she came round?
We had to brush all the syringes under the carpet but that was basically it. We appreciate honesty and we said to her – ‘this is the way we live, we live like pigs, we act like pigs’ and I think she knew what she was getting into when she came to work with two shabby guys in a hovel in Norway.

Robyn sings about being in love with a robot – is that a metaphor for her partner being heartless and cold or is she really saying she loves Daft Punk?
Ha ha – it can be both, well not Daft Punk, but an actual robot. One journalist asked if the robot was her ‘special toy’. That’s not what we had in mind. It can be a girl in love with someone who is constantly working, emotionally severed or it can be more literal. It’s open to interpretation.

Lykke Li is also on the album – how was she to work with?
Well, the same as all the girls we work with. She’s great – truly an artist. Her name means ‘happy’. I think that sums her up – she gives everything in whatever she does. We found her on MySpace prior to the things that have happened for her. We claim to be first.

Why is it called ‘Junior’?
‘Junior’ is the more youthful, direct outlet of what Röyksopp are all about. We have a forthcoming album ‘Senior’ coming out later this year. ‘Senior’ will be more introspective.

Junior/Senior? Is that you guys mucking about again?
That’s what we get for crying wolf for a few years! No-one believes anything we say anymore. ‘Senior’ will be very different from ‘Junior’ and will be out at the end of the year. If you think ‘Junior’ is too quick and too much and too loud then ‘Senior’ is for those who are willing to spend 50 minutes in a bathtub with no interference.

What are the best tricks you two play on each other?
We do odd things that are not expected, like putting food in the other one’s bed or taking a loaf of bread and putting it on the bookshelf in the other’s living room. Then when a guest says ‘What’s that doing there?’ you have to justify it, although you know the other one put it there.

Do you put each other off when you’re doing live shows?
Depends what state the audience and we are in. If it’s a Saturday night and you’re playing a festival and everyone is covered in mud then yeah, its OK to spill a drink on the other’s keyboard.

Did you ever see the photos of Justice playing ‘unplugged’?
Yes, but I don’t know what to say other than I really like Justice. I hope that those who are into electronic and programmed music appreciate that it is impossible to play the kind of music that we do or, even more so, Justice do – just on the guitar. You can’t play any of their songs and get that compressed sound, so people have to get used to sequencers.

What are you in control of when you play?
I control one echo pedal.

Come on.
No, it’s fair to say we do a bit of both – people will see me running the sequencers and doing the percussion bit and basslines on the keyboard and Torbjørn the chords. It became that way because when we first set up our live kit it just happened that I placed myself where the percussion bits were.

Like how a couple has sides in a bed?
Yes, and that’s how we like to see the stage – as a bed.

Anything ever gone really wrong during a live show?
We played in Amsterdam and two bars before the climax of the song the power went. Then it happened a second time – but it all worked out the third time, and everyone went home happy. Together. Holding hands. Singing ‘We Are The World’.

Ever smash the place up?
In Miami we played on a beach and the police told us to turn down the volume so it sounded like iPod speakers. I’d been drinking and had a wireless mic which I tried to throw back into its holder, but it missed and I sent it into the crowd and hit someone on the forehead. I pretended it was part of the act but as I’d insulted the guy I had to go all the way then, so I broke a keyboard as well.

Over the same guy’s forehead?
No, his kneecap.

Do you have obsessive fans?
None yet. There have been a few that you see in Tokyo then in Belgium and you go ‘wait – someone has too much money. Or time. Or a combination!’.

What’s the weirdest rumour you’ve heard about yourself?
There was one about Torbjørn. Apparently he’d been at a party in Oslo where he had found some porn movies and he took these to a room on his own and ‘did his thing’. It’s one of those things that’s hard to go out and deny.

Read more: Mixmag